What, if anything, do you remember about the 90s? For Michael “Mike D” Diamond of the Beastie Boys, it’s the decade when hip-hop reached an “apex moment,” widespread pot-smoking planted the “seeds” (his pun!) of the legalization movement, people communicated via zines, and grunge changed burnout fashion forever.

“All of a sudden, grunge came in, it wasn’t cool anymore, if you were a guy at the gas station, to be into Warrant,” he says in Part 2 of this exclusive video interview with VF.com. “You couldn’t have big, fluffy long hair—you had to have fucked-up shorter hair and a plaid shirt. You couldn’t be walking around the gas station in spandex anymore.”

Diamond also pays tribute to The Arsenio Hall Show and its embrace of hip-hop at a time when names like Ice Cube and LL Cool J still struck fear into the hearts of scaredy-cat suburbanites.

Case in point: this clip of the group performing on the Fox late-night show in the early 90s: